Thursday, July 13, 2006

Antid Oto's Politics Have Mellowed A Lot Over The Past Four Years

I have never met Antid Oto in person (his was the only response to my Craigslist ad for "ANY1 WANT 2 START PINK BLOG W/QT?"), and I've finally gotten around to doing a background check.

It turns out that our own trusted (at least until now) Antid Oto spent some time on the sectarian socialist circuit over in Blimey. He honed his writing skills on Indymedia UK railing against the bourgeoisie "and so-called 'labour' party," elaborating on the oxymoronic nature of "so-called capitalist ethics" and questioning the Trotskyite bona fides of "so-called socialists" (he was also apparently a big fan of the phrase "so-called").

The so called 'socialist' organisations who take place in big anti-capitalist mobilisations across Europe and elsewhere are keen to discredit the Black Block and other Anarchists as a small minority who spoil demonstrations for the majority of peaceful demonstrators. This says a lot about groups such as the Cliffite SWP who are more than happy to betray the Black Block and Anarchists to the cops and open them up to state repression, whilst they side with their own bourgeoisies on all manner of issues and show as always that their self-proclaimed 'revolutionary' credentials and statements are an empty and intentionally misleading cover for their reformist and rotten labourite politics.

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Best of Left Behinds

Ten Worst Americans Our group effort at coming up with the ten worst Americans of all time is our most heavily trafficked page. It's linked on many other sites as an example of "extreme leftist propaganda", but I (Solomon) am just happy to be getting the word out about number two on the list.

George Pataki, You Will Never Be President, So Stop Pataki's latest bout of pandering to the national right wing provokes AO to assess Pataki's viability as a presidential candidate. Sample: "In summary, you are dumb, uncharismatic, middlingly competent at best, not politically savvy, and somewhere between homely and plain."

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Why It Matters To Be Rational Part I and Part II In two excellent posts drawing on research from his day job, AO argues that the US is allocating our collective resources irrationally because of badly misjudged relative risks. "Terrorism is for the most part extremely unlikely ... Global warming, on the other hand, is 100% likely (it is already underway), and if left unchecked its damage will almost certainly dwarf September 11." Yet "the same people who believe in ghosts and ESP believe terrorists are gonna bomb their mini-mall. People cannot distinguish between real threats and fantasy."

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The War on Empiricism In a prelude to the risk posts above, AO argues that more people believe in haunted houses than in the scientific method. Somewhere in this post there must be some Dick Cheney jokes.

Why I am a Liberal, or, Napkins are a Stupid Place to Make Government Policy AO and the Congressional Budget Office force small-government conservatives to "defend low taxation on its merits: either taxes and government are evil and immoral in themselves (the idea the right-wing noise machine has been trying to cram down our throats for 25 years or so), or in utilitarian terms less government and lower taxes benefits everyone more than high taxes and more government."

Left Behinds Gets Spanked Our greatest honor of 2005 was a takedown in the very popular MILBlogging.com, where the man behind the milblogs (a man who SG had called "unnecessary and annoying" in a previous post) noted graciously that LB "looks like some third-grade school project written by some Marilyn Manson-looking blogger named Solomon Grundy, a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan, and a few other contributors." And that was just in his first paragraph. But by the end of the bashing we were not just friends, we were lovers.